This got 1 star from me because there's a bit of totally unnecessary transphobia included in this. It's 2 or 3 sentences but cringeworthy.
This was extremely detailed and informative. I found the tone to be quite dry.
At the same time I almost felt overwhelmed by facts and characters.
This biographer clearly is fond of Louis XVI. Which is understandable given he researched and has been updating this book for decades. That requires a type of passion and dedication.
The historian continually compares Louis to Casandra from Greek mythology. Which I found odd and not at all fitting. Cassandra was ignored because she was a powerless woman. No one listened to her and she had no political power in which to take advantage of her foreknowledge.
The exact opposite is true of Louis. He was the King and as such was being looked to with his words being acted on. Several times he seemed to know he was making the wrong choices but he made them anyway. He was a dysfunctional King, ultimately he died for it. His struggles don't compare to the powerless because he always was in a position of great power. ( )

The goal of revisionist history should be to find the truth, rather than to exalt the subject. It seems from Hardman's work that Louis XVI doesn't deserve the reputation he has earned, but it also seems clear that he doesn't deserve Hardman's adulation.

And worse, Hardman often gets bogged down in extraneous and often voyeuristic details – the deep dive into the Affair of the Queen's Necklace, for example, or the way he peers into the King's bedroom and wedding night. These details are definitely part of history, but so many of them in a single text feels like too much. It makes it feel more like a gossip rag than a serious historical work.

Hardman draws a lot of comparisons between Charles I and Louis XVI, which of course makes sense – executed kings (what a foursquare category!) – but also draws on Louis' relationship to Charles and seems to attribute many of his actions to that descent.

Probably the biggest flaw was that in his attempt to write a hagiography of Louis, he paints everyone around him as various shades of traitorous, venal, or otherwise unpleasant. Marie Antoinette fares better than she often does, but Hardman repeats 18th century smears uncritically; Louis' advisors surely couldn't have all been awful.

And the focus on Louis' personal "goodness" or "grace" shifts the spotlight from the real questions of the era: whether or not the King had a good defense at his trial, is the existence of a king right? Hardman seems to argue "yes," based mostly on the fact that he thinks Louis was a good person, which isn't the point of the Revolution. The reporting on the desire for freedom is colored by the knowledge of what happened, supposedly for the sake of freedom, but Hardman barely acknowledges that the People did have reasonable grievances. He focuses almost entirely on Louis' experience in prison and how hard it was for him and his family – not the politics that put him in prison, or the grain shortages, or the tax situation in larger France.

On a less consequential note, Hardman often has turns of phrase that aren't exactly bad, but seem out of place, and there's a reference to the Iraq war of 2003 as showing that benevolent foreign policy doesn't exist is almost definitely out of place.

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5433. The Life of Louis XVI, by John Hardman (read 21 Dec 2016) I have had a life-long interest in the French Revolution, so I thought I should read this 2016 biography, in a jacket blurb called "simply the most authoritative biography of Louis XVI ever written". It is carefully written and shows it was well-researched. But if one who expects the verve of Carlyle (whose History of the French Revolution I read 27 Dec 1969 and have never forgotten its dash and exciting style) he won't find it in this very competent book. The author makes his point that Louis XVI did some things right and was a more competent person than he has sometimes been depicted as being, but there is a lot of turgidity in the account and I could not find the book enjoyable reading. I conclude that Louis certainly did not deserve to have his head chopped off, but frankly I was glad to get to the last page of the book ( )